Mrinalini Sarabhai, Indian Classical Dancer and Choreographer, Dies at 97

Mrinalini Sarabhai, an Indian dancer and choreographer who brought ancient South Indian dance forms into the 20th century and infused her work with social commentary, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Ahmedabad, in western India. She was 97.

The cause was complications of a stomach infection, her son, Kartikeya, said.

Ms. Sarabhai was one of the first women to perform Kathakali, a classical dance form based on Hindu epics that was usually performed by all-male troupes in elaborate makeup and costumes. She was also among a group of contemporaries who introduced wider audiences to Bharatanatyam, a dance form that had traditionally been presented in temples by women who were promised to Hindu gods.

As a choreographer, Ms. Sarabhai often deviated from the typical subjects of classical dance to tackle injustice.

For example, “Memory Is a Ragged Fragment of Eternity,” a Bharatanatyam dance, depicts a young bride driven to suicide. Ms. Sarabhai’s inspiration came from reading newspaper reports of young women dying of burns and learning that these were often cases of “dowry death”: a phenomenon in which women were abused and sometimes killed or driven to suicide by their husbands for not providing enough dowry.

In the 1970s she created “Ranmalpur,” a short piece based on the killing of five Dalits, or untouchables, in Gujarat. Her 1979 piece “Aspirations” was inspired by the resistance to a dam proposed in Kerala, which environmentalists said would destroy a forest there. She later performed it in front of delegates to a conference on conservation in New Delhi at the behest of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her son said. The dam was never built.

“I was always looking for subjects that would shake people in dance,” she said in “Mrinalini Sarabhai: The Artist and Her Art,” a 2012 film directed by Yadavan Chandran and Ms. Sarabhai’s daughter, Mallika Sarabhai, who is also a prominent dancer.

Image

Ms. Sarabhai, right, teaching Indian dance to the members of the American cast of “The Dream of Vasavadatta” in 1963 in New York.CreditMeyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

Ms. Sarabhai was born Mrinalini Swaminadhan in the South Indian city of Chennai, then called Madras, on May 11, 1918. Her father was a prominent lawyer, her mother a social activist and later a member of Parliament.

Her sister, Lakshmi Sahgal, was, like their mother, active in the struggle for Indian independence, and served as a captain in the Indian National Army, formed by the Bengali freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose.

Ms. Sarabhai studied in Switzerland and at a school run by the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in Shantiniketan, in present-day West Bengal. She learned classical dance from various instructors.

She married Vikram Sarabhai, a physicist regarded as the father of India’s space program, in 1942, and later moved with him to Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat. He died in 1971.

In 1949 she and her husband founded the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad; it is now run by their daughter. In addition to her daughter and her son, an environmentalist, Ms. Sarabhai is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Sarabhai, who performed all over the world (her Darpana company made its New York debut in 1972), achieved renown for bringing innovation to ancient traditions. One of her first major successes was the dance drama “Manushya,” in which she stripped Kathakali dancers of their makeup and costumes so that audiences could focus on the beauty of the movement. She took that dance to Paris in 1949 for her first major international performance.

But it is perhaps in the city of Ahmedabad where her legacy, mingled with her husband’s, is most deeply felt. Their union, said Amrita Shah, a journalist who wrote a book on Vikram Sarabhai and a book on the city, was the marriage of two innovators in distinct fields.

“In a sense they represented the aspiration of newly independent India of that time,” Ms. Shah said. “It was a time of building. It was a time of understanding what this new country was going to be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Mrinalini Sarabhai, 97, Dancer of Conscience. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe